As anyone doing any serious work with Java will be able to tell you, Maven, the software project management tool is not perfect. It is, however, extremely useful and seriously powerful. In a nutshell, it is a tool that lets you easily use 3rd-party libraries in your project while simplifying the build cycle with easily configured plugins that do things like execute unit tests, write metadata for, and package dependencies into one single, final (runnable JAR/WAR) artifact.